Last Call for Papers
Submission deadline extended to 30 April 2009
Digital Cities 6: Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics
Workshop at the 4th International Conference on Communities and
Technologies
Penn State, USA, 24th June 2009
April 30th, 2009 Workshop position papers due
May 18th, 2009 Author notifications sent
June 24th, 2009 Workshop
http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/workshops.cfm
Keynote speaker
We are happy to announce that Professor Carlo Ratti, Director of the
SENSEable City Lab at MIT (senseable.mit.edu), will deliver the
keynote presentation at Digital Cities 6.
The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors
and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach
to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and
understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools
we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying
these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is
the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1 Theme
Transport grids, building complexes, information and communication
technology, social networks and people form the bones, organs,
muscles, nerves and cell tissue of a city. Studying the organisation
and structure of these systems may seem straightforward at first,
since there are visible artifacts and tangible objects that we can
observe and examine. We can count the number of cars on the road, the
number of apartments in a building, the number of emails on our
computer screens and the number of profiles on social networking
sites. We could also qualify these observations by recording the make
and model of cars, the size and price of apartments, the sender and
recipient of emails and the content and popularity of online profiles.
This approach would potentially produce a large amount of data and
render a detailed map of various levels of a city’s infrastructure,
but a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result in a great
quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this data to
better understand the ‘city’ as an organism? How do the cells of the
city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems
communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we
ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we
evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe
in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?
A macroscopic perspective of urban anatomy does not easily reveal
those meticulous details which are necessary to help us understand and
appreciate what Anthony Townsend calls the urban metabolism (Townsend,
2000), that is, the nutrients, capacities, processes and pace which
nurture the city to keep it alive. Some of the fascination with human
anatomy stems from the fact that a living body is more than the sum of
its parts. Similarly, the city is more than the sum of its physical
elements. Trying to get to the bottom of a city’s existence, urban
anatomists have to become dissectors of urban infrastructure by trying
to microscopically uncover the connections and interrelationships of
city elements. Yet, this is anything but trivial for at least three
reasons. First, time is a crucial factor. Many events that trigger
urban processes involving multiple systems result in a timely
interrelated response. A dissection by isolating one system from
another, would cut the communication link between them and jeopardise
the study of the wider process. The city comprises many of these real-
time systems and requires approaches and tools to conduct real-time
examinations. Second, the physical city is increasingly complemented
with a virtual layer that digitally augments and enhances urban
infrastructures by means of information and communication technology
including mobile and wireless networks. This world, which Mitchell
(1995) called the ‘city of bits,’ is invisible to the human eye, and
we require instruments for live surgery to render the invisible
visible. Third and most importantly, the ‘cells’ of the urban body,
the lifeblood of cities, are the city dwellers who have a life of
their own and who introduce human fuzziness and socio-cultural
variables to the study of the city. The toolbox of what could be
termed anthropological urban anatomy thus calls for research
approaches that can differentiate (and break apart) a universally
applicable model of ‘The City’ by being sensitive to individual
circumstances, local characteristics and socio-cultural contexts.
Exploring these three challenges, this workshop looks at concepts,
research methods and instruments that become the microscope of urban
anatomy. We want to discuss urban informatics systems that provide
real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the
invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban
environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban
metabolism processes at work.
2 Topics
Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to the following:
• Civic and community engagement strategies to support urban planning
• Public sphere, participation and online deliberation systems
• Urban e-government, e-governance, e-participation, e-democracy
approaches
• u-City: Ubiquitous computing, pervasive technology, wireless
internet and mobile applications
• Locative media, navigation and space
• Urban informatics design and development methods and epistemologies
• Multi-format user-generated content (narratives, photos, videos,
multimedia)
• Neogeography and 3D virtual environments for urban design and planning
• Simulations to reproduce and analyse complex social phenomena and
city systems
• Social networking, collective intelligence and crowd sourcing in the
urban context
• Environmental, economic and social sustainability
• Citizen science
• Access, trust, privacy, safety and surveillance
• Implications for residential architecture and the design of cities
and public spaces
• Ethical considerations scrutinizing the assumptions behind urban
informatics
3 Organisation and Submission Details
This is a full day workshop. We will start off with a keynote address
by an eminent speaker. Rather than formal conference-style paper
presentations, we will follow the successful peer interview format and
ask each participant to interview another contributing author. Pairs
will be assigned in advance to prepare questions and engage with the
paper. After lunch, there will be a range of group activities and a
closing plenary discussion at the end. The workshop can accommodate a
maximum number of between 25 to 30 participants including presenters
in order to provide an environment that is conducive to debate and
interaction.
We are interested in three types of contributions:
Concepts: Essay style papers discussing theoretical and conceptual
ideas and innovation within a cross-disciplinary framework.
Methods: Papers reporting on novel approaches in the area of urban
informatics, e.g. network action research, shared visual ethnography,
urban probes, cross-disciplinary methods, etc.
Systems: Reports of systems and case studies that ground findings in
practice and experience.
Prospective participants are asked to submit a position paper (2-4
pages total, in English, ACM SIGCHI 2-column format, same as for the
C&T full papers) related to one of the workshop topics. Each
submission should also include a short biography stating the author’s
background and motivation for attending the workshop. Workshop
position papers are due on April 30th, 2009 and will be reviewed and
selected by the organisers with the support from an international
program committee. Accepted authors will be notified by May 18th, 2009
– to leave enough time to qualify for the early bird conference
registration. The acceptance of a workshop position paper implies that
at least one of the authors will register for both the workshop and
the Communities & Technologies 2009 conference. The workshop takes
place on June 24th, 2009. After the workshop, selected contributors
are invited to submit a full paper by October 1st, 2009. Full papers
will undergo double blind peer review before being published.
Arrangements for an edited book or a special issue of a relevant
international journal are currently underway.
Template:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
4 Bibliography
Each Digital Cities workshop has produced an edited volume containing
selected workshop papers and other invited contributions as follows:
Digital Cities 5 -- Foth, M. (Ed.) (2009). Handbook of Research on
Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City.
Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.
Digital Cities 4 -- Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (Eds.). (2008).
Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Digital Cities 3 -- van den Besselaar, P., & Koizumi, S. (Eds.).
(2005). Digital Cities 3: Information Technologies for Social Capital
(Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 3081). Heidelberg, Germany:
Springer.
Digital Cities 2 -- Tanabe, M., van den Besselaar, P., & Ishida, T.
(Eds.). (2002). Digital Cities 2: Computational and Sociological
Approaches (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2362). Heidelberg,
Germany: Springer.
Digital Cities 1 -- Ishida, T., & Isbister, K. (Eds.). (2000). Digital
Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science No. 1765). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
5 Organisers
Marcus Foth
Senior Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Australia
m.foth at qut.edu.au
Laura Forlano
Kauffman Fellow in Law, Yale Law School, New Haven, USA
laura.forlano at yale.edu
Hiromitsu Hattori
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto
University, Japan
hatto at i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
--
Dr Marcus Foth
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology (CRICOS No. 00213J)
Victoria Park Rd, Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia
Phone +61 7 313 x88772 - Fax x88238 - Office K506, KG
m.foth at qut.edu.au - http://www.urbaninformatics.net/